Steve Goodman “Say It in Private”

This is that Steve Goodman record with the cover pic of him in a bathtub styled after that famous David painting, The Death of Marat (1793)—showing the guy dead in his bathtub, I guess assassinated, stabbed to death! Which makes me uncomfortable, since the time a landlord barged in while I was taking a bath (plumbing problem, water leaking, not my fault). You don’t want that—you want to be able to relax and write in your bathtub like a normal person. It just occurred to me that Clifton Webb, typing in his bathtub, at the beginning of Laura (1944), also refers to that painting. Here, it’s extra disturbing because it’s a photo made to look like a painting or vice versa—I’m not sure which—so it’s a little “uncanny valley.” There are a few cover songs here, and the rest written by or co-written by Steve Goodman—some dealing with social-political themes that are, naturally, dated—best to think of it as a time capsule of 1977. The weird thing is that in the sense that it’s dated, it feels very contemporary—in that “the more things change the more they stay the same” sense. Also, I feel like 1977 was just around the corner in that I don’t usually buy records that come out past 1975 or so—just a preference. Production started getting worse, I don’t know why. I do love Steve Goodman, but this record has a combination of topical humor, irreverence, politics, sentimentality, and bad sound—but all in the wrong places—so it’s a bit of a bummer, for me, overall. I do really like, the more I consider it, the album cover.

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